Nalin's POV
The darkness exploded into light.
Not gentle light—blinding, rainbow light that shattered through a thousand ice sculptures. I threw up my hands to shield my eyes, stumbling forward into the fortress.
When my vision cleared, I froze.
This wasn't a monster's lair.
It was the most beautiful place I'd ever seen.
The walls were made of black ice that somehow glowed from within. Sculptures lined the hallways—frozen flowers, soaring birds, dancing figures caught mid-spin. Light bounced between them, creating rainbows that moved and shifted like living things.
"What is this place?" I whispered.
My voice echoed back a hundred times, getting quieter and sadder with each repetition.
I walked forward, my footsteps crunching on frost. The hallway opened into a massive room with a ceiling so high I couldn't see the top. More sculptures filled the space—these ones showing people. A woman laughing. A child playing. An old man reading a book.
They looked so real. So alive. Like someone had frozen actual people mid-moment and turned them into art.
"Hello?" I called out. "Is anyone here?"
The voice from before didn't answer.
I kept walking, deeper into the fortress. Every room was the same—beautiful, empty, frozen. It felt like walking through a museum of someone's memories. Someone who had loved life and laughter and warmth.
Someone who had lost it all.
In the third room, I found something different. A stone table with books scattered across it. I picked one up—the pages were frozen solid, but I could still read the words on top:
Day 10,957 of imprisonment. I've forgotten what sunlight feels like. I've forgotten what her laugh sounded like. I've forgotten everything except the cold.
My chest tightened. This wasn't written by a monster.
This was written by a prisoner.
I flipped through more books. They were all journals, all written in the same elegant handwriting, all counting days in a prison.
Day 10,958: Another sacrifice arrived today. A young man, barely twenty. Broken by his family for being "emotionless." I tried to save him. He died anyway. I buried him in the courtyard with the others.
Day 11,203: I wonder if I'm going mad. I swear I can feel something stirring in the seal. Something that tastes like... freedom?
Day 11,504: The empire grows more cruel. They torture their own children now, seal away their magic, and throw them to me like garbage. Do they even remember what I was? What they made me into?
"What they made you into," I repeated quietly.
The Ice Warden wasn't born a monster. He was created. Made into something terrible by the empire.
By my family.
"You understand now."
I spun around.
He stood in the doorway, and my breath caught in my throat.
The Ice Warden was beautiful. Painfully, terrifyingly beautiful.
He looked like a man—tall and lean with silver-white hair that moved like it was floating in water. His skin was pale as snow with frost patterns crawling up his neck and across his jaw. His eyes were the most startling thing—winter-sky blue, cold and ancient and full of so much pain it hurt to look at them.
He wore clothes made of ice and shadows, constantly shifting and reforming. When he moved, the temperature dropped so fast my breath froze mid-air.
"You're not a monster," I said.
His laugh was bitter and cold. "Aren't I? Ask the empire. Ask your father. They'll tell you I'm the demon who almost destroyed the world."
"But you didn't. Did you?"
He stepped closer. I should have been afraid. Every instinct should have been screaming at me to run.
But I wasn't afraid.
"No," he said quietly. "I tried to save it. And for that crime, they sealed my emotions, stole my humanity, and locked me in this frozen hell for three hundred years."
"Who are you?" I asked. "Really?"
"My name is Kael." He stopped three feet away from me, close enough that I could see the frost forming on his eyelashes. "I was the youngest prince of the Valtheric Empire. Your great-great-great-great uncle, I suppose. Though I doubt they mention me in the family histories."
My mind reeled. "You're... you're my family?"
"Was. Before they decided I was too dangerous to live." His eyes locked onto mine. "Before they ripped out my emotions and turned me into this."
"I don't understand. Why would they—"
"Because I discovered their secret." Kael's voice turned sharp and cold as breaking ice. "I found out the empire was torturing people to harvest their emotions for magic. Creating weapons from concentrated suffering. When I tried to stop it, my own brother—your ancestor—sealed me away and spread lies about me being a monster."
The room spun. Everything I'd been taught, everything I'd believed about the empire, about my family—it was all lies.
"They've been doing it for three hundred years," Kael continued. "Getting stronger while I rotted here. Using me as a battery to power their precious emotional magic."
"Using you how?"
He touched his chest, and ice spread across the floor between us. "There's a seal here. Connected to every mage in the empire. They've been draining my power this whole time, taking what they need and calling me a monster to justify it."
I thought about my father's rage-magic. Elara's joy-magic. All the powerful nobles and their amazing abilities.
Built on three centuries of stolen power.
"The sacrifices," I said. "The people they sent you—"
"Were people like you. Born with magic the empire couldn't control. So they sealed that magic, broke those children, and sent them here to die." Kael's eyes blazed with cold fire. "I tried to save every single one. Most died from the journey before they even reached me. The ones who survived..." He gestured toward a doorway I hadn't noticed before. "I'll show you."
I followed him through the door into a courtyard. Snow fell gently from an impossible sky—we were inside the fortress, but somehow also outside.
And in the center of the courtyard were twelve graves.
Simple markers of ice, each carved with a name and date.
"Twelve people in three hundred years," Kael said softly. "Twelve innocent souls the empire threw away. I buried them. Mourned them. And hated myself for not being able to save them."
I knelt beside the nearest grave. Marcus, age 19. Sealed at birth. Died three days after arrival.
Tears froze on my cheeks.
"They were going to add you to this collection," Kael said. "The thirteenth sacrifice. Another broken child for the empire to forget."
"But I'm not dead."
"No." He knelt beside me, and when our eyes met, something passed between us. Recognition. Understanding. "You're different. You have magic now—magic they couldn't fully seal. Magic that tastes like..." He reached out slowly, giving me time to pull away.
I didn't.
His cold fingers touched my forehead, and the world exploded with sensation. I felt his emotions—centuries of rage and loneliness and grief and desperate, desperate hope. And beneath that, I felt something else.
The seal. The same dark magic that trapped him, wrapped around my own heart.
"You're like me," Kael whispered. "They sealed you the same way they sealed me. We're the same."
"Can you break it?" I asked. "Can you free me?"
"Yes." His hand dropped away. "But there's a price. Breaking your seal will return my stolen emotions to me. We'll be bound together—connected by magic and fate. Your life will be mine. My power will be yours. If you die, I return to this cage forever."
"And if you die?"
"Then you die with me."
I looked at the twelve graves. At the journals full of lonely days. At this beautiful, broken prince who'd been turned into a monster by the people who should have loved him.
Then I looked at my own frost-covered hands. At the ice magic growing stronger every second. At the future that waited for me if I refused—dead in a grave with my name on it.
"Do it," I said. "Break the seal. Bind us together. I don't care anymore."
"You should care," Kael said. "This will hurt. You'll feel everything I felt when they sealed me. Every moment of agony. And when it's done, you won't be the same person you were before."
"Good," I said. "I don't want to be that person anymore. She was weak and afraid and broken. I want to be something else."
"What do you want to be?"
I met his winter-sky eyes and smiled—a real smile, sharp and cold and dangerous.
"Something they'll regret creating."
Kael studied my face for a long moment. Then, finally, he smiled back. It transformed his face, making him look less like a monster and more like the prince he used to be.
"Then let's show the empire what happens when you break a cage instead of what's inside it," he said.
He placed both hands on either side of my face. His touch was ice incarnate.
"This will break you before it remakes you," he warned. "Last chance to run."
"I'm done running."
"Then hold on, Princess. Because everything you think you know about yourself is about to shatter."
His magic slammed into me like a frozen avalanche—
And I started screaming.